This is a perfect example of how messy things can get when the debate between competing concepts, such as Peak Oil vs 'No Problemo', gets highly politicized and entwined in all sorts of extraneous views and personal adgendas.

One thing that  I fully agree with is that, on average, 'expert's don't predict the future any better than lay people.  In fact, the track record on expert prediction is pretty dismal, for the most part. It seems that too much information is just as much a liability as too little when it comes to making predictions. I think the reason is that with an overload of information, one is more likely to, consciously or unconsciously, pick and choose that information that best fits one's value judgements and view of the way one would like things to be. In other words, an expert in econometrics is just as likely to self-delude himself as a person with no special expertise. I've seen so many bone-headed predictions by revered experts that I tend to ignore predictions in general. (Though I make them myself.)

Does this mean that there is no point in even trying to make predictions? No, but let's face the fact that no one really knows how things will be say 10 years from now. No one.

If you want to get a good idea of how fanciful most predictions are, just take a look at a stack of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines from the period 1945 - 1960. The unbridled optimism about how technology was going to make all our lives so wonderful now looks so quaint and naive. If their predictions came true, we'd all have person robot servants and atomic-powered personal planes by now. Cars would look even more stupid and zoomy than then did in 1958.

Keep in mind that very few people predicted the internet or even the women's lib movement. People are always caught by surprise by that unexpected thing coming out of left field.